Pivot, the only move that matters is your next one by Jenny Blake. Reviewed

By @SimonCocking. Review of Pivot by Jenny Blake (Portfolio Penguin). Speaker. Career & Business Strategist. Yoga Fanatic. Love helping people organize their brain 🙂 See more about the book on her website here.

Careers are not linear, predictable ladders any longer; they are fluid trajectories. No matter our age, life stage, bank account balance, or seniority, we are all being asked to navigate career changes much more frequently than in years past. The average employee tenure in America is just four to five years, and even those roles change dramatically within that time. Our economy now demands that we create businesses and careers based on creativity, growth, and impact. In this dynamic world of work, the only move that matters is your next one…

This was an enjoyable and thought provoking book. As someone preparing for a TEDx talk on the future of work it was also a good bench mark against which to compare and contrast her ideas. This is a great book to read at the weekend as you consider your working career, where it might be going and more importantly where you might like it to go. Blake has great experience having worked as the co-creator of Google’s Career Guru program, and experiencing change and unexpected alterations to what she had imagined her career path to be.

She quotes Steve Jobs on page 11 “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect then looking backward”. This means you need to assess what is going on around you, aim to read trends,  and know that no one has all the right answers, all of the time. Blake also suggests you take on work that other people don’t want to do, because it may lead you to become an expert in a new and unexpected field. She also describes the concept of following FONT rather than FOMO, namely that many successful people are driven by the Fear Of Not Trying rather than Fear Of Missing Out. Better to have tried, failed, and moved on, rather than have regrets about possibilities you didn’t try out.

It’s a useful book to read, one that you might enjoy and could also help prepare you for the future roller coaster that could be your career from here onwards.

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